Elena Firsova is a Soviet composer and music teacher, born on 21 March 1950 in Leningrad. She was born into a family of physicists: her father, Oleg Firsov, was a theoretical physicist and a recipient of the Lenin Prize in 1972. She began composing at the age of eleven.
Firsova studied at a music school in Moscow from 1963 to 1966 and at a music college there from 1966 to 1970. She graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1975, where her teachers included Alexander Pirumov, Yuri Kholopov, Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz. She joined the Union of Soviet Composers in 1976.
She was married to the composer Dmitri Smirnov, with whom she helped organise the Association for Contemporary Music. Since 1991 she has lived in England. From 1993 to 1997 she was Professor of Composition at Keele University in Staffordshire, and she taught composition in Manchester from 1999 to 2001.
Firsova has written more than one hundred works in nearly every genre of classical music. Her catalogue includes the operas Feast in Time of Plague (1973), after Alexander Pushkin, and The Nightingale and the Rose (1991), to texts by Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti; concertos for cello, violin, piano, horn and viola; orchestral works; and twelve string quartets. A substantial part of her vocal music sets poetry by Osip Mandelstam, including Tristia, Earthly Life, Forest Walks, Before the Thunderstorm, Winter Songs and Whisper of Light.
She received commissions from the BBC, BBC Proms, German Radio, the Brodsky Quartet, Expo 2000 and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Her Requiem, for soprano, chorus and orchestra to poems by Anna Akhmatova, was premiered at the Konzerthaus in Berlin on 6 September 2003. Her music has been published by Hans Sikorski, Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer and Meladina Press.
With Smirnov, Firsova translated the fifth volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, The Captive, and they published online Fragments on Denisov, documenting Soviet and post-Soviet musical life. Their daughter, Alissa Firsova, is a pianist, conductor and composer.